This invention has to do with fruit harvesters of the type used in harvesting olives, fruit, grapes and other mechanically harvested products that grow above ground. Mechanical harvesters of the general type disclosed herein are known to be large over the crop, over-the-row, devices that are most generally self-propelled.
The invention presented herein is a harvester that has a provision for harvesting from one side of a crop row while simultaneously including the collection of crop from the “off-side” side of the row.
There are several types of mechanized harvester in the field of harvesters that this invention pertains. One type of harvester is an over-the-row (“OTR”) harvester. This is generally a very large, self-propelled, harvester. It has significant height and a massive frame. The height is necessary to clear the tops of fruit trees, olive trees, and the like. The massive frame is necessary to provide structure to support drive axles, the prime mover of the harvester, the picking heads, of which there are usually at least two—at least one on each side of the harvester, and the crop transport system. A massive structural frame is necessary to support the propulsion and steering systems and the picking heads. Another reason that the frames are massive is that over-the-row harvesters don't have transverse axles between the left side and the right side wheels thus a significant structure is needed to support equipment on both sides of the harvester. The over-the-row harvester has to straddle the row being harvested to avoid contact with the trunk of the tree, the vines and the vine supports and the like comprising the row.
A conventional over-the-row harvester harvests both sides of the row thus mandating that fruit is collected from both sides of the tree or row of product, resulting in a high volume of harvested product. The harvester has to have enough picking units to harvest the entire tree, for instance, an olive tree, in a single pass. This leads to the need for complex drive systems. Often the picking heads are hydraulically operated and the operation system of a picking head contains several subsystems. Another component of the drive system is the hydraulic drive for driving the vehicle's wheels. A second hydraulic system is needed to steer the driving wheels, a significantly complex system in the case of the typical four-wheel drive system. Another complex hydraulic system on the over-the-row harvester is the system to provide suspension and leveling functions. The over-the-row harvester needs to be large enough to accommodate the volume of harvested product harvested from both sides of the row. This adds to the cost and complexity of the over-the-row harvester.
The over-the-row olive and fruit tree harvesters are high cost harvesters with associated significant maintenance costs due to the complexity of the systems involved in the harvester.
Another type of mechanized harvester in use today is known as a down-the-row single-sided harvester (“DTRSS”). The DTRSS is essentially a single sided over-the-row harvester and shares some of the complexities of the OTR harvesters. A down-the-row single-sided harvester costs about sixty percent of the cost of an over-the-row harvester but the efficiency of the DTRSS harvester is less than half of the efficiency of the OTR harvester. Despite that DTRSS harvesters are smaller, lighter and more agile than OTR harvesters they suffer the drawback of not being able to collect the portion of the crop that is shaken from the tree or vine and lands on the “off-side” of the row. This is a big disadvantage of the DTRSS harvester. This disadvantage is overcome with the invention herein disclosed. A second disadvantage of the DTRSS harvester, as is also a disadvantage with the over-the-row harvesters, is the high maintenance required in support of the drive systems used in the down-the-row single-sided harvester.
The harvester invention presented herein overcomes the disadvantages of both the over-the-row and of the down-the-row single-sided harvesters by providing a light weight but structurally sound towable harvester that is inexpensive, compact, efficient in that it collects crop from both sides of the harvested tree or vine even when operating from only one side of the row.